Tag: grails

I’ve recently started working with Groovy on Grails at work. Groovy is a dynamic language that runs on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), and Grails is a high-productivity open-source web-application framework that leverages the Groovy language. Grails follows the “convention over configuration” principle, taking away a lot of the grunt work that goes into creating web applications. It also uses proven technology like Hibernate and Spring with a consistent interface. You can have a Grails app up and ready to go with only a few lines of code. This high productivity is also due to the fact that Grails uses Groovy, which is a dynamic language and is much more expressive than Java. Finally, because Groovy runs on the JVM, it has full access to Java’s rich API.

Groovy comes with a number of built-in tags which allow you to quickly create forms, form controls, or any number of other HTML constructs or elements. However, I noticed that Groovy didn’t provide a built-in tag to build a SELECT that includes OPTGROUPs. OPTGROUPs allow you to group options within a drop-down select-box. But this problem can be solved because Groovy supports the creation of custom tags. After reading a bunch of documentation and looking at a few examples, I was able to create my own SELECT tag that supports OPTGROUPs. Here is an example of the usage of the tag: